Sermonising
I first preached the Word in a church context back in May 2006. I was kindly given a go at the lecturn for a new preacher’s night, which was an initiative to give people a chance to write and present a sermon based on a passage of their choosing. I chose Ezekiel 37 and ended up preaching what ended up sounding like an essay on the text, with something about Jesus shoehorned in at the end. The feedback was kind, but, I feel, avoided the truth about the negative aspects of my style and my approach to the text – in hindsight, I realise that I didn’t really approach the passage from a ‘whole Bible’ perspective and didn’t devote much time to looking at how the passage is fulfilled in Jesus, which is a shame, because it’s a golden picture of redemption and recreation and humble obedience to the true King.
Preaching is now part of my job description, and I recently had a go at giving a Bible talk as part of a series on Daniel. Fortunately, my trainer saw fit to give me Daniel 5, which lies in the narrative section and not the acid-trip apocalyptic section, but the challenge remained to conquer the weaknesses of my first attempt. The initial draft blew out to 4,500 words, but with some effort and painstaking trimming, I got it down to a reasonable 3,000 words which still managed to communicate my intentions. I feel that it went off OK on the night.
Did I manage it? You can decide – listen to my efforts right here and see what you think.
Blargle
Wordle seems to be the new toy for those hip computer people (thanks to Guan for the find). It makes plain text more interesting by plotting it into artistic clouds, coloured and everyfink. Sweet, eh?
The applications for various word-related frippery are many and varied. Guan pointed it to his journal; others have allegedly converted the ESV New Testament into word clouds. The interesting thing is that when you…wordle your text (behold, I am anticipating that ‘Wordle’ will suffer the same fate of ‘Google’ and become verbised), the size of each word reflects its frequency in the source. Ashamedly, this reminded me of the various psychometric instruments which utilise word frequency as an independent variable, and made me think that psychology journals would be so much easier to read if they only used word clouds instead of graphs. You can take the nerd out of the university, but…
Anyhoo, if you weren’t at SNC on Sunday night, you can catch up with what was said by clicking below. Perhaps you could play ‘Spot the Illustration’?
Grind
The word is that I have bruxism.
This saddens me, for lo, I used to have very good teeth. Yet I had been wondering why a lone front tooth had, like a glacier, been inexorably working backwards. A four-years-late trip to the dentist revealed why. “You’re probably grinding your teeth when you sleep,” he says, shortly after telling me that I will need root canal surgery ‘one day’ on an old filling. Having that contrast in my head makes bruxism seem like good news. Still, the tooth doctor also says that if I don’t do anything about it, my glacial front tooth will eventually move so far that it will start interfering with my tongue, which means braces will be required, so he tells me to try a mouthguard when I sleep.
The medical community doesn’t seem to know why some people grind their teeth while most people don’t. I tried to diagnose myself using Wikipedia’s associated factors list and the only match was ‘relatively high levels of consumption of caffeinated drinks and foods’. Does two cups of coffee a day count as relatively high consumption? Anyway, so much for modern medicine, because not only do they not know why it happens, but they can’t cure it – the best they could offer me was the exercise in damage control that is the acrylic mouthguard, which the bruxist must wear at night, every night, for the rest of their lives.
The idea appealed, in some ways. It’s cooler than dentures, but you still get to mess around with something that looks like your teeth, and the opportunities for practical jokes are there. But it’s not as comfortable as it might look to sleep with a mouthguard in – try stuffing the space next to your gums with erasers and you’ll understand why.
And, my brain seems to understand this, even while sleeping, because for three out of four nights, I have managed to remove the mouthguard in my sleep and hidden it in the blankets. This causes some consternation upon waking: the first time it happened, I thought I had swallowed the entire thing without knowing. It’s a miracle that I haven’t choked.
Any fellow teeth-grinders out there?
Mosaic
1. Ben Arthur Cairn, 2. Chhole (Indian Curried Chick peas), 3. Tyndale Monument, 4. How much more red could this be?, 5. GA S3 Cast, 6. Not a good time for a photo, I’d rather have coffee first, 7. Lahore art, 8. thursday: dessert, 9. 21May06 Bangladesh Missionaries (21), 10. Plus haut, 11. Shades of life, 12. Batwood I Can Take That Shot Too
From Kathleen.
Cultural mystique
Is the emerging church thing passe yet? I am only just getting my head around it and I am fascinated and disturbed in equal parts. I really enjoy learning about it and talking with people about it, but I am wondering if it is a dated issue by now. I am in the process of slowly compiling some thoughts on this, provoked by our time spent in staff meetings reading Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (2003), but here are some preliminary thoughts.
Firstly, the emerging church defies description. I have read several attempts to define and capture the emerging church movement(s?), though none that have really gained any credence. It seems that there are different degrees of ‘emergence’, and these degrees appear to stem from different thinkers or leaders who are a part of this movement(s). For example, Brian McLaren appears to be one of the more influential leaders of the emergent church, but his thinking on the topic seems to be more liberal-theology than Dan Kimball, whose book is heavily focused on culture and the arts over theology. Appropriately, no-one who I have read claims that the emerging church has a central manifesto or set of articles of faith – much like the postmodernity that it clings to, emergence claims that it cannot be boxed. Instead, it feels more like a series of ‘works-in-progress’, always moving towards something rather than saying, ‘this is what we are’. I’m not sure what it is they are moving towards, though. It smacks of narrativism.
Secondly, and relatedly, the emerging church is characterised by mystique. There is a (renewed?) fascination with the unknown and the unknowable. I have read (though I am yet to rediscover this source) that there is a tendency to be somewhat agnostic about God’s character – we cannot know all about God, in our limited human wisdom, so we should embrace a more mystical view of Him. I wonder if this goes hand-in-hand with the generally liberal theology that is coupled with the emergent church movement(s) – to create a spiritual experience for today’s savvy non-churchgoer who is suspicious of the more traditional church, it seems that many thinkers and leaders in the emergent church(es) have abandoned hard-fought-for fidelity to the Bible. Emergents seem to advocate a view that we cannot know God through His Word, so we must turn to other ways to find Him – experience, meditation, music, the arts. I wonder, then, if the emerging church has more in common with gnosticism than Biblical Christianity.
Thirdly, I am yet to read a coherent and cogent analysis of postmodernism which validates the emerging church’s foundation. Dan Kimball’s book devotes some time to talking about postmodernism, but I am not convinced that he is really engaging with postmodernity and its associated epistemological underpinnings. For example, I think he has failed to appreciate what the word ‘deconstruct’ means – he seems to use it as a synonym of ‘take apart’ (which, on the surface, is what it literally means), whereas the word takes on more nuance when discussing postmodernity, suggesting an analysis of meaning in texts and language and how meanings shift when read in light of certain contained assumptions. I am also dissatisfied with Kimball’s rendering of modernism (and, to some extent, postmodernism) as a homogeneous caricature with little nuance or detail.
Fourthly, I get the feeling the emerging church is generally more critical of the ‘institutional church’ than of postmodernism. Perhaps this is an unfair statement, but so far, the general attitude towards ‘traditional’/‘seeker-sensitive’/‘institutional’ church in Kimball’s book is that it works for ‘moderns’, but not ‘postmoderns’. But he then appears to let postmodernity drive his proposed new way of structuring church, without really critiquing whether that’s appropriate.
Fifthly, there are some positives to the emerging church, despite my grouchiness. It prompts us to take a good look at culture and subculture and assess how church interacts with those around us. It promotes the need to take the gospel to the unchurched (i.e. those who have no Christian experience or roots and have little to no exposure to Biblical Christianity in their lives). It challenges us to rethink methodology and how we ‘do’ church gatherings. It demands that we confront issues that we are perhaps scared to confront.
I am working on being more lucid about all this soon (with references! I promise!).
Mixed bag
Loving:
- The school holidays (now sadly over).
- Stardust. Unexpectedly good!
- Cooler weather.
- Working for TAC.
- Ian Irvine’s The Well of Echoes quartet (oddly).
- The Guggenheim Grotto, Jimmy Eat World, and Clare Bowditch.
Not loving:
- Our car.
- The constant state of fear and not-knowing in ministry.
- The state of the Anglican communion right now.
Thinking:
- Crap, where did all this wind come from?
Resigned to:
- There always being more washing.
- Some things not changing.
Wanting:
- A French horn.
- More time.
Anticipating:
- Another great term of SRE and other activities.
- Writing more…one day.
- A new neighbour (though we love our old neighbour).
- A new car (when we’ve sold the old one).
- Townsville and beyond in 2008-9.
Well...I can dream.
We have ignition
In the wake of a visit by long-term ‘career’ missionaries this week at Toongabbie Anglican Church, I am confronted by the question of what makes people interested and passionate about supporting missionaries, both in Australia and overseas. Many people become excited when they hear from the missionary’s mouth when they are amongst us, but I wonder: will they be as excited in six weeks? Six months? A year? I suspect, somewhat pessimistically, that there will be a fair drop in the amount of interest people have over time. The question then becomes, how to sustain that interest?
We discussed the matter for a short while in staff meeting. No amazing insights or brilliant solutions for now, but it was interesting to toss the question about and examine it. My current thesis (which is in no way complete or authoritative) is that, particularly (but by no means exclusively) amongst the younger generations, interest in world mission and missionaries serving cross-culturally tends to penetrate only to a superficial level, often focused on differences in sociocultural landscape. I have personally observed this on a few occasions, from talking to high school-aged kids about broad-scale world mission issues to hearing questions asked by older folk at our recent all-church prayer night. People are interested in and ask questions about the differences – what languages are spoken where you are? What is the shopping like in Cheng Mai? Where do you live? What is it like? Can you buy the same foods there? Do you miss Vegemite? Do they have iPods in Namibia?
Certainly not unhelpful questions, in the right context, and it is encouraging to see interest at all! But, I wonder if, for many, the interest stops at this superficial level of comparing differences between sociocultural environments and fails to hit the gospel ministry being done by the missionary.
Perhaps this speaks of the insular, self-absorbed characteristic of my generation, and/or reflects something of the prominence of overseas travel in these times (I read here that the number of ‘Generation Y’ kiddies spending significant amounts of time going overseas is increasing). If so, then it may follow that the interest in the surface-level details about the cross-cultural experience of overseas missionary work is, at least in part, due to the desire to experience difference in general. Indeed, one of the most popular words used in advertisements for holiday packages seems to be ‘experience’.
This could explain why short-term mission trips are becoming the new ‘rite of passage’ for many young Christians. The trend seems to be that people would rather go and experience another culture (and, hopefully, get a decent look and have a go at ministry in that culture) than give money to support long-term missionaries. This certainly fits with the experiential learning models, advocated by Kolb, et al., which focus on our extraction of meaning from direct experiences. I go to another culture and experience, and therefore extract some form of meaning. There are debates about the benefits of short-term mission trips which I won’t really go into here – they focus mainly on the impact on the national church in the cultures visited by short-termers, the difficulties associated with a short-termer’s ability to contribute in any real way to ongoing ministry, language barriers, culture shock, financial effectiveness, etc. Such debates explain why organisations like CMS haven’t been committed to supporting short-termers. Certainly, long-term missionary work is where the real harvest work seems to be: the long-termer has time to develop relationships, learn the language and culture, preach the word more effectively. But, there are sure strengths to the well-prepared, well-executed, and well-contextualised short-term trip.
As one who has been on two trips (arguably the second not being quite so well-prepared and -executed as the first), I am a bit biased, but I would say that the short-term trip does seem to represent one way, albeit an expensive one, to bring some enthusiasm back to the home church. Our trips to the subcontinent have ignited an ongoing connection with the children’s home we stayed with and have contributed to some increase in the prominence of world mission, particularly amongst the younger people – still, there is room for this to continue (and, as I am charged with the promotion of overseas missionary work as part of my traineeship, I’d better find a way to do so!).
But, I am distracting myself from the main issue. I believe that, in order to be truly excited and passionate about the work of God in other, farflung places, a person must firstly be truly excited and passionate about the work of God in general – as evidenced by a renewed heart and mind which long to serve their true Master. Only then will people really be interested in the work of our brothers and sisters overseas, and hence commit to prayer and financial support of those brothers and sisters. The barriers to such passion, then, are mostly founded in the patterns of this world, specifically in the younger generations. Better stop blabbing about those barriers and start looking for ways to overcome them!
Sharp incline
(inspired by Guan, who writes better than me about this stuff)
Starting working in full-time ministry is exciting and terrifying at the same time, like walking along a steep cliff-face, like abseiling, like when you’re swimming at the beach and you go out past where you can touch the bottom.
Full-time ministry is exciting. There’s so much happening that you may not know or fully know as a churchgoer, even a churchgoer who is keen and involved. I’ve started thinking and talking in higher-order ideas about structures and relationships and things. I’ve been reading books about ministry (heretofore purchased but rarely looked at). I’ve visited Sydney Anglican HQ and met with people who I’ve previously only heard on MYC and KCC sermon tapes. And us MTSers get together a few times a year and I get to meet a lot of other young guys and girls who are bound together in the task (including the aforementioned Guan). But, most of all, I get to preach the gospel each week and study the Word a lot more, and that can only be a good thing.
But there is also terror. A lot of ministry feels foreign, in the way that my squash racquet feels like a cudgel in my hand, rather than a new appendage – meeting people, trying to draw new maps where old ones have failed, trying something, failing, and trying again. There is a lot of output, and not always with a visible result (in fact, sometimes with a discouraging result). Time is often against me. I often feel such an overwhelming sense of uncertainty about whether I am doing the right thing that I am frequently tempted to not try at all.
There is some relief, at least, in all of this.
A vile business
My church has recently had the opportunity to object to a development application released by the local council, relating to a proposal to develop a brothel in a nearby area.
Writing my own objection letter has forced me to think through the grounds on which I establish the inappropriateness of a brothel. Clearly, as a Christian, I (and, I should hope, those from my church who are also planning on objecting) have chosen to let the council know that I disapprove on the grounds that a brothel encourages and sanctions sexual immorality, in a way demonstrative of the way God has given man over to lustful sin and the depravity which has resulted. As Christians in a sinful society, we are called upon to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-14) and be distinctive, and I think it is reasonable to say that one way of doing so is objecting to the development application for this brothel.
However, I find myself wondering if the council will dismiss the Christian argument out of hand. Our objection is largely based on a worldview which presupposes a number of things – the fallen state of man, the sinfulness of having sex with a woman (or man) who is not your spouse, the vile nature of building an institution which is permissive of such relations, the sovereignty of God and His anger at our sin. I’m convinced that this, surely, underlies any Christian objection to brothels (and prostitution in general); I am not entirely convinced, though, the council will not demand more evidence from Christians if their objection is to be upheld.
I initially thought that you could move away from a Christian argument and adopt a more moralist perspective, which seems to more or less define those who have objected to brothels elsewhere in Sydney. These people often cite a range of reasons for their opposition to applications for brothels, including the defilement of sex (as a special and private activity, though the reasons for this vary), the degradement of women who prostitute themselves in brothels, the distasteful nature of paid sex, and so on. Moralists may also argue more ‘pragmatic’ reasons for their opposition, including the increased use of substances allegedly associated with prostitution (which, I hear, is not borne out in research – though I wonder if that would be an artifact of the population being studied), increased noise, paraphernalia being left around the area, the possibility of the exposure of children to the activities being held in the brothel, and so on.
But, the more I thought about that, the more the idea stuck in my craw. A moralist position is not based on absolutes (as the Christian position is), but each moralist is speaking from assumptions. What is their view on the nature of sex? Is their problem that prostitution violates the sanctity of a sexual union between…a man and a woman? A man and a man? A woman and a woman? On what grounds does prostitution violate this sanctity? Is it to do with cheapening the sex act? Breaking the bond of fidelity? A pairing of sex with money, and, by extension, a commodification of sex? Without the Bible’s guidance, these presuppositions present to me as being rickety and easily disputed, at least in secular fora.
Of course, I don’t advocate adopting the view of those who approve of brothels on the basis of ‘why not?’. Indeed, I have read the arguments of civil libertarians (a title I use cautiously) who reject the arguments of Christian and non-Christians alike, saying, in essence, that every man or woman has the right to seek pleasure (including sexual pleasure) in whatever fashion he or she chooses. It has even been said that, should the ‘buyer’ and the ‘seller’ in a brothel be consensual and willing parties to the ‘transaction’, then this is no different than the buyer and seller experience we have when we go to the grocery shop. The civil libertarian, depending on the extremity of their stance, would then say that any moral objections to prostitution are founded purely on the idea of what we should consider ‘evil’ as a society. It is at this point that I wonder what disgusts the Lord more – the unifying of a man with a prostitute, or the cheapening of sex and the blatant approval of sex outside God’s intended context by those in this extreme libertarian position.
The essence of my objection to a brothel must be, in some way, religious, moral, and/or ideological – brothels have been decriminalised since 1995 in New South Wales, so I cannot argue that a brothel is, in essence, a criminal establishment. The only solace for any kind of legal argument lies in the council’s restrictions on where a brothel may be built (and, as it turns out, I believe the development application violates several of those restrictions). I can only hope that God’s sovereignty means that the council will consider, in some way, God’s wrath towards all sin, including prostitution, in their deliberations.
